After Death
by BlueCorpse
Summary: This contains spoilers for the end of Telltale's 'Walking Dead' game series. It concerns what happens to Lee after the end. I hope that you enjoy it. 'Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death...'


Cold. It was cold. He was cold. He was dead and he was cold. The radiator was cold.

Something hurt. It was his hand. Not hand. Handcuffs. He was dead.

The handcuffs were hurting him.

He was...

'I... am...'

'I... am... Lee.' he thought.

He realised that his eyes were open. There was an open door in front of him. There was something below him, and he wanted to look, but he could not move his head.

He realised that he was not dead.

All the gears began to turn: he was alive, alive, alive! He hadn't turned!

He remembered Clementine, leaving. He needed to find Clementine. Above all, Clementine.

Lee stood up, or tried to. His legs didn't work. He tried to move them and found that he couldn't.

'Too weak...' he thought.

'Clementine...' he thought, and tried again, and this time his legs worked.

Lee sat up from where he had been slumped against the radiator. He pushed himself forwards and began to stand up.

The handcuffs stopped him. When they were as taut as they could be, Lee found himself pulled back to the ground.

'I'd forgotten about them... damn.' He remembered Clementine taking the keys. He felt despair.

He let his head fall to the floor, and glanced upon the dead police officer, trapped under the pillar.

Lee had an unlikely idea. It was the only one he had.

Lee gripped the leg of the police officer with both of his own stiff, aching legs and began to pull the officer towards him, horribly slowly.

When the officer was close enough, Lee reached out with his hand, the one that wasn't handcuffed, the one that he hadn't cut off with an axe.

Lee's idea had worked. On the officer's belt was a spare set of keys.

With numb, fumbling fingers, Lee undid the handcuffs and let them fall to the floor. He slid down against the wall, unbelievably exhausted.

He noticed that despite being tired, he didn't seem to be breathing any heavier.

In fact, he wasn't breathing at all.

Nothing went through Lee's mind at that moment.

On auto-pilot, Lee reached out to a large shard of glass that was lying on the floor nearby.

He held it up to his face.

He saw what was in it.

He dropped the glass to the floor, where it shattered.

* * *

Lee stayed there for a long time, unmoving, just hoping to die, _really die_ he thought, just wishing against all wishes that this was some fucked-up nightmare vision his brain was showing him in the last second of his life, or that he really had died and had gone to Hell and this was his punishment, anything except this being what he knew it really was. He tried to cry but found he could not.

Eventually, he stood. He looked into the glass of the case which held various jewellery and saw his reflection: his bloated, distended, rotting, dead face and the soulless eyes staring back at him. He had turned.

That was not the bad part. He had expected to turn. He had told Clementine to let him turn, to not let her waste the bullet.

_But he could still think._

By the act of the cruelest possible God, he was still Lee Everett, and he could still think, and he could understand what he had been turned into. He did not know how it had happened. Maybe it happened to all of them. But it remained: he was trapped in his own body.

He could not walk now, nor run; only stagger in a jagged manner, like the rest of them. He tried to scream, eventually, and could only let out a growl, like the rest of them.

And worst of all, like the rest of them, he began to feel the most horrific hunger imaginable...

He needed to eat. He needed to eat flesh. To do that, he had to get out of here and onto the streets. His gaze wandered to the door hanging open: the way Clementine had left. He began to shamble, a nightmarish, twisted parody of walking, to the door.

* * *

Who would have thought there could be so many of them? Before, there had been hundreds; now, thousands of the walking dead bustled through the silent streets of Savannah. And Lee was one of them. He walked forwards, with no aim and no conception of an aim, pushing forwards through the moving corpses, the hated enemies who were now his equals. He wondered if they had all kept their minds as well. Maybe they were asking the same question.

He regarded them, and saw that they were nothing but thin flesh stretched tight over the bone. No-one had come to Savannah for many days, and the horde was starving because of it. The hunger was in Lee's mind with every step he took and every thought he made, and now, it said to him: _ get out of the city_.

It was right. He would starve too, if he stayed here. The part of him that was not the hunger, and that called itself Lee, thought that it wanted to starve, and finally be done with it all. Except that this hunger was too great... it overpowered him. He walked now with an aim: the country.

Days passed. Nights passed. The thing that may or may not have been Lee kept moving. He was out of Savannah now, but did not notice it. Grass was bent beneath his rotting feet. As he shambled forwards, images flashed towards him.

Kenny. Clementine. Shooting Duck. The dairy farm. Watching Clementine eat human meat. Clementine. Eating Clementine –

"NO!" he thought, a fraction of himself returning from the black pit of the hunger.

Then the hunger fought back: _eating Clementine_, it repeated, over and over, a sick chant, _eating, eating, eating..._

"No, no, no..." Lee thought to himself, in the deepest agony.

"I'll never be... like them..." he kept thinking. "I'll find a way... to end it all... I won't..."

_You will..._

"I won't hurt her... I won't -" was Lee's last thought on this Earth, because at that moment a bullet went through his skull and lodged deep into his brain, tearing veins and letting loose thick torrents of black blood which flooded out of the hole in his head. The corpse fell to the ground, face-down.

The man lowered his rifle, reloaded, and nodded to the woman besides him. They began to walk on. As they passed the corpse, the man took a second to look down at it.

The woman spoke.

"What, starting to feel bad for them?"

He turned to look at her.

"Hey, Cass."

"Yeah?"

"You ever wonder about who they used to be? Like, before?"

"No... because that's stupid. They're dead. Why you askin', James?"

"No reason, I guess. Just that this one looked strange."

"How so?"

"Looked like he was smiling as he went down."

"Smiling, huh."

"Yeah."

"C'mon. We're burning sunlight."

They began to walk on.

"Hey, there's another one."


End file.
